THE MUSIC OF PAUL HINDEMITH DAVID NEUMEYER New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986.

Rights reverted to the author in 1992. Series: COMPOSERS OF THETWENTIETH CENTURY. ALLEN FORTE, General Editor INTRODUCTION Biographical Framework An Analogy to Bach A Common Thread Postscript to Performers 1 4 7 12 16

INTRODUCTION Igor Stravinsky once referred to three neoclassic trends in twentieth-century music: his own, Arnold Schoenberg's, and Paul Hindemith's.1 [notes at the end of the le] This comment needs to be taken advisedly on several counts, not the least being that in another interview Stravinsky admitted his "shameful ignorance" of Hindemith's music.2 Still, it is a reminder of the remarkable early success which Hindemith enjoyed. Stravinsky and Schoenberg were both more than ten years older and had established their careers before the First World War while Hindemith was still a conservatory student. But by 1922, at the age of twenty-seven, Hindemith was already a well-known composer, and ve years later he was appointed professor of composition in the Berlin Musikhochschule, one of the best academic positions in Germany. Part of his success in the twenties was undoubtedly due to his ability as a performer, a skill he combined with vigorous advocacy of contemporary music of all kinds. It is no overstatement to assert that the combination of performer and composer was at the heart of his musicianship. Alfred Einstein's famous assessment of Hindemith as the natural musician "who produces music as a tree bears fruit" may easily and appropriately be extended to all his music making, not just composition.3 Being a creative performing musician was not anomalous or an unresolvable paradox, but an essential part of his makeup, as it was to a long line of masters from J. S. Bach and Mozart, to Beethoven and Liszt, to Rachmaninoff and Bartk. Stravinsky's remark also points to the pervasiveness of an active interplay between musical tradition and the avant-garde in the period between the two world wars. As many writers have noted, however, the variety of the results can only very loosely be contained by the word neoclassicism. The "return to. . ." movement of the twenties was

part of a general rejection of the old romantic and expressionistic culture that was held responsible for World War I. More specically, it was a rejection of the later romantic insistence on continuous evolution, a doctrine which can still be seen clearly in the writings of Schoenberg and others. The "return to" meant looking back beyond romanticism, beyond the nineteenth century, in search of artistic ideals or compositional models. Darius Milhaud, one of the composers of the Parisian group les Six, described the motivation as follows: "What musicians asked for now was a clearer, sturdier, more precise type of art that should not yet have lost its qualities of human sympathy and sensitivity.. . . After all the vapors of impressionism, would not this simple, clear art renewing the tradition of Mozart and Scarlatti represent the next phase in the development of our music?"4 The term neoclassicism conveys at best only a partial sense of the ways in which this crisis of tradition and modernity was played out in the twenties and thirties. Indeed, perhaps the best way to regard the "return to . . ." movement is as the nal chapter in nineteenth-century historicism, as characteristic a feature of that era as its doctrine of progress. We may treat similarly the term neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the German equivalent of the French neoclassicism of Stravinsky and the composers of les Six which Hindemith took up deliberately in early 1923, and of which he is the principal representative. He was put forward by his apologists as the neue Typus, the antiromantic urban composer who thrived on clarity, concision, and linear energy rather than on the late romantics' diffuse forms, exaggerated emotion, and tortured harmonic logic.5 The dichotomy was useful as fuel for polemic, but it obscured the fact that in an important sense Hindemith was also a true inheritor of the mantle of Brahms, the romantic conservative.6 The "return to" brand of neoclassicism lay very much on the surface of Stravinsky's music, as in Pulcinella or the Octet. It was at best only an awkward appendage to a few works by Schoenberg; the Suite for Piano, Op. 25, is an example. But for Hindemith the object was always synthesis, reconciliation of past and present. The problem he faced, however, was more complex than Brahms's looking over his shoulder at Beethoven. In common with most composers in this century, Hindemith's methods were eclectic, taking advantage of the extraordinarily increased opportunities to learn about, hear, and play music of all periods and nations afforded by the publication of historical music and such technological advances as radio and phonograph. The composers who made the most of these possibilities were those who could confront different types of music and turn their experience into a convincing, consistent personal voice. Hindemith achieved such a stylistic synthesis in the opera Mathis der Maler (1933-35), which drew together elements of the Western musical tradition from the medieval era to the present, by no means excluding the nineteenth century. The renement and further exploration of that synthesis occupied him to the end of his life.

The inward journey his music describes is necessarily subtle and complex and is revealed in ways that the casual listener may often miss. Though my principal task is to chart this course of development in terms of technical features of his music, a secondary tasknecessary to the rstis to ll an important gap in Hindemith research: an adequate interpretation of his compositional theory, including the nature and extent of its connection to his practice.7 Hindemith is hardly alone among twentieth-century composers in being associated with a self-produced theoretical framework for his music, but he is the only major composer who attempted to make that framework comprehensive, general, and capable of acting as much more than a handy tool chest of compositional devices. Because he linked the theory to analysis and criticism, an assessment of it is necessary in any assessment of his music. I will therefore propose a new view of the Craft of Musical Composition8 and allied works and, based on my reading, an analytic method suited to Hindemith's music. BIOGRAPHICAL FRAMEWORK The bare framework of facts about Hindemith's career, his development in compositional style and technique, is easy enough to set forth. By way of orientation to the subject, I have given a very condensed list of those facts in the section below. To 1917 (and war service): Juvenilia, primarily chamber music on German classical and romantic models; Cello Concerto, Op. 3 (1916). 1918-22: These years combine eclectic experimentation after Debussy, Schreker, Busoni, Reger, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartk, with activity designed to make his name known as a composer: involvement as composer, performer, and (later) one of the directors of the Donaueschingen modern music festivals (which with the festivals of the ISCM [International Society for Contemporary Music] were the leading such fora in Europe for contemporary music in the 1920s); the founding of the Amar quartet, which specialized in new music; and the premieres of three scandalous one-act operas (Mrder, Hoffnung der Frauen; Sancta Susanna; and Das Nusch-nuschi). 1923-27: Early in 1923, during the composition of the song cycle Das Marienleben, Op. 27, he turned abruptly to the linear-contrapuntal manner of the New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit). This shift is especially exemplied by the Kammermusiken series (Opp. 24, 36,46) and the opera Cardillac, Op. 39. In 1927, Franz Schreker appointed him professor of composition in the Berlin Musikhochschule. 1927-32: There are three strands in this period, two showing the inuence of professional colleagues in Berlin, the third distinctly Hindemith's own: (1) experimentation with mechanical and electrical instruments, as well as ancient instruments; (2) involvement with the Jugendmusikbewegung, a musical laymen's organization that sought, among other things, to promote amateur performance of German music of the early and prebaroque eras and the integration of some of its

stylistic aspects into new music composition; (3) the beginnings of a synthesis of the Jugendmusik-inspired style with his New Objective manner. This becomes clear in the opera Neues vom Tage and the three Konzertmusiken, Opp. 48-50, but is already evident in the last of the Kammermusiken, the Organ Concerto, Op. 46, no. 2. It is in connection with the Sing- und Spielmusik that the term Gebrauchsmusik (music for use) so often associated with Hindemith rst appears. His promotion of the ideals of the Youth Music Movement, a collaboration with Bertolt Brecht in 1929, and nally the composition of the libretto for Mathis der Maler are the closest Hindemith came to direct involvement in the great, sharply polarized political-social questions of these years, though the conception of a grand musical community of laymen and professionals continued to inform his work throughout his life. 1932-42: This is the decade of Mathis, a time in which Hindemith's personal circumstances became unsettled. Performances of his music were banned in Germany, he lost his teaching position, emigrated to Switzerland in 1938 and then to the United States in 1940, where he took a new academic position at Yale University. But at the same time he fully achieved the synthesis of technique and style he had been working toward, and a period of free and masterful composition followed: Mathis der Maler and the solo and orchestral works closely related to it (including Der Schwanendreher [1935], Trauermusik [1936], and the several solo sonatas after the Sonata in E for Violin [1935]). He also worked out the rst of a series of revisions of earlier pieces: Five Songs on Old Texts (original. Op. 33 [1924]; revised 1933) and Marienleben (Op. 27 [1922-23]; revised 1936-37, but not completed until 1945; published 1948). Another major task was the formulation of a compositional theory and pedagogy in The Craft of Musical Composition 1 (1937) and 2 (1939). 1942-52: With the Ludus Tonalis (1942) came even greater stylistic differentiation and renement of technique, but also the rst evidence of a tendency toward abstraction. In many respects, this was the best decade of Hindemith's careerhis circumstances were tranquil, and he produced a continuing series of varied, mature compositions. He wrote a number of textbooks, including the third volume of The Craft of Musical Composition (not published until 1970), as well as a kind of compositional confessional document, A Composer's World (1952; based on the Norton lectures at Harvard, 1948-49). 1952-56: A relatively dry periodrevision of Cardillac, but few new compositions. Hindemith worked sporadically on the opera Die Harmonie der Welt, which was completed in 1957. Documents give some evidence of a short-lived compositional crisis provoked by his alienation from the important segment of the rising generation of German composers represented by the Darmstadt school. He moved to Switzerland in 1953, taught at the University of Zurich till 1957, and was increasingly active as a conductor. 1956-63: Hindemith retired from university teaching but continued conducting until his death. He produced few compositions (by earlier standards): some large works

including the Pittsburgh Symphony (1958) and his second Organ Concerto (1962), both commissioned; an exquisite one-act opera on a libretto by Thornton Wilder, The Long Christmas Dinner; a set of madrigals; and nine of thirteen Latin solo motets. Throughout this period, he attempted to broaden his stylistic base by a limited, very personal accommodation with the mannerisms of post-Webern serialism. His last work was a Mass for mixed chorus a cappella, premiered under his direction little more than a month before his death in December 1963. The reader will nd a short and highly readable account of Hindemith's development with reference to specic compositions and writings in Ian Kemp's Paul Hindemith. Kemp has also written the "Hindemith" entry for the New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians. A study that makes considerable use of letters and other documents but avoids analysis of the music is Geoffrey Skelton's Paul Hindemith: The Man behind the Music. The standard biography, Andres Briner's Paul Hindemith, published originally in German, is soon to be published in an updated English translation.9 The reader who commands German will nd three pictorial biographies helpful: Paul Hindemith: Zeugnis in Bildern, Paul Hindemith: Die letzten Jahren, and Giselher Schubert's Rowohlt monograph.10 Reports on Hindemith scholarship have been appearing in the numbers of the Hindemith-Jahrbuch/Annales-Hindemith, which began publication in 1971.11 An excellent summary of the views of German scholars in the past decade can be found (along with more pictorial documents) in the program book of the Nordrhein-Westfalen Hindemith festival (1980-81).12 AN ANALOGY TO BACH In writing a critical appreciation of Hindemith, I feel rather as Kirnberger or Forkel must have felt in promoting the work of J. S. Bach near the end of the eighteenth century. Hindemith is doubly out of fashion now, as Bach was then. Even at the height of Hindemith's reputation and inuence, when "the rst pieces of his on the radio in 1948-49 were for us indescribable discoveries," as Karlheinz Stockhausen recalls,13 stylistic changes in serious and commercial music were beginning that quickly left Hindemith behind. By the time of his death, a generation of composers who based their work on the post-Webern serialism of the 1940s was already active. These composers were not only knowledgeable about electronic music and jazz, but were also willing to exploit that knowledge. To them Hindemith could only have been as old hat as Bach was "old peruke" to his own sons.14 Furthermore, Hindemith had the same unsettling tendency to infect his music with the qualities of the "learned mathematician," as Scheibe labeled Bach: abstract symbolism, an apparent lack of interest in instrumental color, and an off-putting tone of didacticism. Like Bach in the 1780s, Hindemith's reputation is covered with clichs fair and false which have clung to him more tenaciously than to any of his contemporaries.

The Hindemith-Bach analogy, like any, becomes problematic if pushed too far. (It would be absurd, for example, to nd in the severe, scientistic generation of the fties an equivalent to the rococo!) But the analogy is not wholly idle. Hindemith himself invoked it in a Bach bicentennial address in Hamburg in 1950,15 at a time when he must have begun to realize that, by refusing to return to Germany to live after World War II, he had also forfeited his leadership among young German composers. Hindemith is not the only composer in the rst half of this century whose work is gradually being rescued from the complexities and confusion of the era in which he lived. The rapid pace of events, the virulence and surprising persistence of strongly polarized polemic, the wide range of national and international inuences, unprecedented ease of communication, and the resulting multiplicity of crosscurrents in the political and social spheres all had their counterparts in the high arts, science, and technology. Though the era's lode points, the two World Wars, are all too clear, the paths to and from them are many and often still obscure. In music criticism, as in art criticism in general, it is a commonplace that the signicant complexes of ideas cluster about historicism and modernism. But from these complexes extraordinary paradoxes arise. The musical avant-garde of the early 1920s was an inchoate collection of atonalists, "young classicists" (after Busoni), vitalists, folklorists, and some pre-World War I expressionists. The dominant creed was the modernism of literature, painting, and sculpture. (As C. S. Lewis put it, "counterromanticism makes strange bedfellows."16) Yet this modernism, paraded about as a truly revolutionary doctrine, was fundamentally an extreme extension of postures of the nineteenth-century romantics, a romantic modernism that held dear the old, convenient polarities: "the alienated artist against the complacent bourgeois, the avant garde against the academy, the outsider against the establishment." The modernist rejected precisely the most characteristic images of culture and society in the 1920s: "the machine, the metropolis, the mass man in mass culture."17 The resulting ironies are clear and numerous. It was not the section of the avantgarde most directly associated with the older generationthe expressionists, like Schoenbergthat made the rst substantial inroads into the elds of lm music, mechanical music, or a rapprochement with commercial music (the new jazz), but the neoclassicists, the historicists who were supposed to be following Busoni's advice and deliberately looking well back into the past for innovation.18 Nevertheless, the expressionists succeeded in posing the most radical new compositional techniques, like Schoenberg's dodecaphonic method. In music criticism, August Halm and Heinrich Schenker turned the modernists' arguments against modernity.19 Both opposed organic unity (the artwork as biological system) to the mechanical.20 The alienated artist became the isolated genius whose ideas were secrets hidden from the masses of lesser intellects. For Schenker, these secrets were knowledge of the principles of composing-out from the natural triad and prolongation

of strict counterpoint as well as possession of the ability to improvise out of the background (Ursatz). For Halm, the secret of genius was the ability to achieve the nal synthesis of compositional craft and will (in Schopenhauer's sense). The result is an inversion of the polarity avant-garde against the academy. Schenker plainly saw the academy in his contemporaries among music historians and theorists, and he repeatedly vilied those who he felt should have known better, who should have been able to grasp the nature of genius, but who were blind to it. The so-called avant-garde, on the other hand, was lled with radical know-nothings and nihilistic madmen. Schenker and Halm disagreed on who was Zeus in music's pantheon (Halm favored Bruckner, Schenker Beethoven), but both were in agreement on their principal task: the preservation of an older aesthetic culture free from the political and materialistic distortions so bitterly obvious in the twenties. The true person of the present was the one who could appreciate genius; not the avant-garde versus the academy, but the true musician versus the academy, the modernist avant-garde being outside the argument altogether. That the practical result of their views must be stylistic and technical stasis did not seem to concern them. As Schenker stated: A theory teacher writes: "If Beethoven were composing today, his tonal language would more closely resemble Hindemith than Clementi." The names of Beethoven, Hindemith, and Clementi clash rudely here! It might be ... but the solution to this problem is really very simple. If we assume that Beethoven were writing "today" like Hindemith, then he would be just as bad as Hindemith. If there were a composer alive of Beethoven's abilities, rest assured, he would compose like Beethoven!21 The present century has been an era of great diversity and sharp contrasts, an era which, at least until the Second World War, drew forward many of the paradoxes and contradictions of the nineteenth century. I have dwelt on these points in order to emphasize a perception underlying recent Hindemith criticism. As Ludwig Finscher writes, Hindemith's work is "at once more and less than the [critical] ideologies would have it. Clich images are little help in grasping the whole picture, complex and contradictory as it is." What Peter Gay says of Brahms may as appropriately be said of Hindemith: "The lesson of his reputation is the urgent need to restore our sense of complexity in Modernism."22 The various Hindemiths of music criticism over the years have been mostly cardboard guresthe Dadaist-for-a-day of the early twenties, the unreective Musikant or Spielmann, the dogmatic natural theorist, the tonal reactionary, and the bitter and isolated retiree. Such characterizations are in the same league as those that make of Schoenberg nothing but a dodecaphonic radical, Stravinsky a suave pandiatonicist changing styles like hats, or Bartk a Hungarian folk melodist. All are too simple to be true.

Hindemith especially needs to be rescued from the residue of the tonaldodecaphonic debate of the late forties and fties. Certainly he was partly responsible for the outcome: his Craft of Musical Composition and later publications promoted a physically based theory of music with the major triad at its center, and he vigorously rejected deliberate atonality or polytonality and serial techniques. His criticism of the last in particular has caused both consternation and confusion.23 Hindemith plainly did not connect his assessment of the fundamental shortcomings of serial techniques with his opinion of the "classic" music written with their aid. For example, in his nal act as a university teacher he gave a series of lectures on Schoenberg's string quartets at the University of Zurich in 1957; in an earlier lecture he described pieces by Webern as "complete miniature forms [which] are thoroughly consistent. . . and can be recognized as such immediately."24 But Adorno found in Hindemith as useful a villain as he did in Stravinsky and worked out a critique centering on the Musikant and on Gebrauchsmusik, by means of which Hindemith was said to have violated modernist principles and so his place in the necessary historical evolution in attempting to obscure the distance between the composer and public. To Adorno, Hindemith was bourgeois and unimaginative ( = not alienated), not profound ( = not a genius), a dogmatic theorist ( = academic).25 The revisions of several of his earlier compositions worked out in the 1940s and early 1950s became the hapless victims of this critical battle. Hindemith red the rst shot with the "Introductory Remarks" to the revised Marienleben cycle (1948), in which he repeated his antiserial arguments and set up a spurious dichotomy between his earlier and later work. The critical attitude toward Hindemith that prevailed about the time of his death can be summarized as follows: the wild-eyed radical of the early twenties who seemed to alternate between morally irresponsible expressionism and Dadaist absurdity eventually became the benign exponent of Gebrauchsmusik, turned dogmatic when he acquired a theory, and nally became bitter when he could not convert everyone to his point of view. Fortunately, in the past decade the situation has begun to change, and the picture that is gradually emerging is much richer. Even in Hindemith's very eclectic and often simply modish early music, Dieter Rexroth has found evidence of sober historical reection, which would have contradicted the Musikant clich before it was formed.26 By 1925 Hindemith knew the most current theoretical writings of Schenker and Kurth, and he could write to the former: I can say to you that I am an enthusiastic and delighted reader of your books. Delighted because ... in them the foundations of musical creation are revealed, whichas you so rightly say again and againhave always been and will always be valid. And for our present-day music they are just as important as for any in the past. That I, before I had read a sentence of your writings, sought

consistently to fulll these fundamental requirementsplease do not laugh yet do believe true of me. These attempts have in part failed, to be sure; in many pieces they are probably not clear, in others they are perhaps hidden in a waste of supercialities. (It takes a long while before one has come so far as to be able to express correctly what one wishes to say.)27 More recent scholarship offers a view of Hindemith's career and music that supplants both the "young-brash-atonal" versus "old-dull-tonal" polarity of the old criticism and the constructivist, counter-romantic neue Typus of Strobel and Mersmann.28 This is hardly to claim unanimity among Hindemith scholars or to suggest that the old criticism is wholly dead. In Arnold Whittall's Music since the First World War, for instance, the schizophrenic Hindemith appears once more as brash, atonal, vigorous in his earlier years, but suffering a change of heart about the time of Mathis and promptly becoming careful, tonal, and anemic: "Dull, leisurely, lyric ow is the predominant quality and one longs for a touch of the old eccentricity or vulgarity." There is even the patrionizing sympathy for the old man evident in some earlier literature: "It is innitely sad that Hindemith's later music gives no more than an occasional icker of a positive conservatism which could have balanced the youthful excesses of the 1920s."29 A COMMON THREAD If the Hindemith-Bach analogy is dependent on an unpredictable future and the atonaltonal or progressive-conservative dichotomy is insufcient, then what are the common elements in Hindemith's artistic journey from the New Objectivity through the Jugendmusikbewegung and Mathis der Maler to "Ite, angeli veloces," Harmonie der Welt, and the Mass? The central theme is exactly that consistent development which the old criticism denied him. Hindemith began with the juxtaposition of counter-romanticism to expressionism, advanced to a synthesis of that juxtaposition with attributes of nineteenth-century style, and nally, through years of renement, tended at times to carry the synthesis into an idiosyncratic, abstract world of musical symbolism. In the rst stage is the neue Typus; in the second, Mathis and music allied to it; in the last. Melancholie des Vermgensthe melancholy of success Hindemith himself ascribed to Bach.30 The New Objectivity was frankly antiromantic, a rejection of preWorld War expressionism and an afrmation of a new urban culturesociety as a city-machine. The New Objective composers substituted linear, kinetic energy and deliberate formal constructivism for the nineteenth century's psychological development (motivic working and endless melody), functional harmony, and sensuous orchestral timbres. To counteract the self-serious subjectivism of the expressionists in particular, the music of the twenties was brittle, witty, sometimes vulgar, and often politically engaged. Even

music using expressionistic techniques was more "spatial" than emotional, resulting in a "constructed subjectivism." Excellent examples in Hindemith's work are the slow movement of the Kammermusik No. 1, Op. 24, no. 1, the slow movement of the Sonata for Viola, Op. 25, no. 4, and the Passion songs from Das Marienleben, "Vor der Passion" and "Piet." These pieces, all from 1922, combine pure form with intensity in much the same way as the early Bauhaus paintings of Klee and Kandinsky. In the rst extended study of Hindemith's music (1925), Franz Willms claimed that the consistent thread in his development was "emphasis on the melodic and a striving for formal clarity."31 In traditional major-minor tonal music, the essential dialectic was between the forces of melody and harmony. In the new music of the twenties this opposition was replaced by melody and form. The melodic line has energy, motion, rhythmic drive, motivic "thought"; form shapes and controls. This is closely related to contemporary emphases in the visual arts. Klee's famous phrase "taking a line for a walk" shows the conception of line as energy and as thought. The return to simple geometric forms shows the clear shaping and control of that linear energy. Willms takes for granted the pervasive inuence of Ernst Kurth, an inuence seriously underrated in much current literature on music of the twenties. Composers after the First World War took their justication for "linear counterpoint" and "functionless harmony" from two of Kurth's books, Die Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts and Romantische Harmonik.32 (I leave aside the question whether the reading was a fair one.) For Willms, "With Hindemith the purely kinetic character of melody . . .stands in the foreground."33 A functionally indifferent harmony focuses attention on these purely melodic forces of linear energy, motive, and rhythm. Kurth also opened the door to functionless harmony with his assertion that the intrusion of melodic elements into the harmonic structure broke apart, separated, the elements of that structure, so that harmonic logic was often reduced to a few harmnonische Hauptstutzpnkte (harmonic pillars), which appear occasionally in order to hold up some kind of larger harmonic-tonal logic. To replace the form-creating power of harmony, form was now constructed, either as the psychological ow of motivic development and variation or by clearly articulated (often borrowed) designs. Hindemith was never so radical a Kurthian as, say, Ernst Krenek. By the time he turned to the New Objective manner in early 1923, Hindemith had achieved a synthesis of kinetic energy and tonal framework that served him well for a long time, though it was more than two years later before he achieved a similar synthesis of surface stylistic elements in the opera Cardillac (1925-26). By reclaiming the tonal framework, Hindemith did intuitively what in the late thirties and forties he would do deliberately: balance and equalize the three forces of melody, harmony, and rhythm (form). When Hindemith wrote his Sing- und Spielmusik in the late twenties, he found himself in a very different milieu, away from a brash, cynical cocktail-party modernism, in a circle of earnest, historically-minded amateurs. But the intellectual change that

brought him there was not so great as it might seem. He had already been looking for an accommodation between past and present that would give a better moral foundation to his work, as the nal sentences of his letter to Schenker make explicit: "Try to have the calm that permits one not to denigrate one's fellow men.. . . The calm and the boundless love for music that have brought me to undertake everything that I have even this perhaps pointless lettercan serve to put misunderstandings out of the way, make rough places plain, and further work with, not against, one another."34 The obvious historicism of the Jugendmusikbewegung can obscure the strong and antiromantic elements present there as well, namely the rejection of the virtuoso, of the hegemony of professional music making, and of the medieval-Renaissance dichotomy central to the nineteenth-century debate between romantics and liberals. Closely bound to this is the repudiation of the progress argument, the insistence on an inevitable, unbroken chain of historical evolution. A positive interaction with older music and appreciation of its vitality challenged the notion that the main function of historical music is to prepare for the present. In A Composer's World Hindemith says bluntly, "The evolutionist theory of music's unceasing development toward higher goals is untenable."35 The composers of the New Objectivity "progressed" by antithesis, but those who guided the Jugendmusikbewegung rejected the dialectic altogether. The complex interplay of these ideas and their reconciliation is an underlying theme in the libretto to Mathis der Maler36 and makes possible the special style and technique of its music. A decade later Hindemith wrote a short poem called "The Posthorn (Dialogue)" as an epigraph to the nal movement of the Sonata for Alto Horn (or Alto Saxophone [1943]). The Horn, a powerful symbol in German tradition, speaks rst: Is not the sounding of a horn to our busy souls .. like a sonorous visit from those ages which counted speed by straining horses' gallop, and not by lightning prisoned up in cables; . The cornucopia's gift calls forth in us a pallid yearning, melancholy longing. The pianist counters this simple nostalgia with a play on "old" and "new" that is often quoted as a summary of Hindemith's musical and philosophical outlook: The old is not good just because it's past, nor is the new supreme because we live with it, and never yet a man felt greater joy

than he could bear or comprehend. Your task it is, amid confusion, rush, and noise to grasp the lasting, calm, and meaningful, and nding it anew, to hold and treasure it. By using the music of all eras as models, he hoped to step outside the evolutionary treadmill, but by retaining certain techniques, even certain attitudes, of the previous century, not reject his place in the present. Hindemith's Bewahrertum37his conservatismwas positive in a way that the New Objective counter-romanticism could not be: it was a successful, very personal synthesis of ideas and attitudes that, as social-cultural synthesis, had failed in the Weimar Republic. The demise of the Weimar Republic and the loss of the world to which his artistic synthesis referred was an important part of Hindemith's later melancholy. But equally important was the threat he felt by the late forties to his attempts to generalize his notion of world community over nationalism, community action over professional oligarchy, and a balance between progress and preservation.38 In 1950, shortly before he gave his Bach bicentennial lecture in Hamburg, Hindemith wrote the foreword to a collection of fourteenth-century French secular music compiled by Willi Apel.39 The second paragraph of this foreword is not only an affecting critical appreciation of this music by a person deeply involved with it as a performer, but is also a mature expression of his musical and personal ideals: The modern musician's problems, of which there are so many, will lose some of their puzzling oppression if compared with those of our early predecessors. ... It is rewarding to see those masters struggle successfully with technical devices similar to those that we have to reconquer after periods in which the appreciation of quantity, exaggeration, and search for originality in sound was the most important drive in the composer's mind. They knew how to emphasize, on a fundament of wisely restricted harmony, the melodic and rhythmic share of a sounding structure. Their distribution of tonal weight, their cantilever technique of spanning breath-takingly long passages between tonal pillars hardly nds it equal. Their unselsh and uninhibited way of addressing the audience and satisfying the performer; the perfect adequacy of poetic and musical form; the admirable balance of a composition's technical effort and its sensuous appeal these are only a few of the outstanding solutions they found in their works. One could go on pointing out surprising and exciting features in those miraculous microcosms of sound, but these few hints will sufce to make us aware of the creative power that keeps those structures in motion and of the human quality that guided their creators.

POSTSCRIPT TO PERFORMERS The practical musician looking for clues on how to perform Hindemith's music will receive little help from the "Performers" chapter of A Composer's World. Instead, he will nd deprecation and even insults not wholly uncharacteristic of that sometimes visionary, sometimes cranky document. Mixed in with Hindemith's noble if fastidious view of a world in which music serves moral improvement (its true role is not its "sensous exterior") is a somewhat incongruous defense of the composer's birthright. He goes so far as to say: "That music for its realization has to count on the performing musician is an inherent weakness, although it cannot be denied that the multiplied tensions between composer and listener, added in the course of a composition's performance, are a source of further intellectual and emotional sensations which may heighten our enjoyment."40 Hindemith's relation to the performer, despite his own virtuoso skills, is not a simple one. He had every reason to want to protect his music from the extremes of "over-individualistic exhibitionism on the one side and the dullest metric-dynamic motorism on the other".41 Yet though he articulated his position on the matter, he seems by action to have contradicted it. For example, he is reputed to have said that he did not supply extensive performance instructions in his compositions because any good performer would know what to do with the music anyway.42 Nor can one always trust what is there: once when Keith Wilson of Yale was preparing an ensemble to perform the difcult Wind Septet (1949), Hindemith audited a rehearsal, then took over the baton for another reading and changed a substantial number of performance directions in the process, including all the indicated tempi.43 I suggest that Hindemith should often be treated like a baroque composernot in the sense that one should add ornamenting diminutions (certainly not!), but in the sense that one must be free to emphasize the best musical qualities of his pieces. A successful performance will display analytic and proportional sense, show a grasp of hierarchies, and illuminate a sense of drama, of action, within an essentially tranquil framework. Nothing has done Hindemith more harm than the supposedly neoclassical renderings with which his sonatas especially have had to contend (and not just from immature performersGlenn Gould's recordings of the three piano sonatas (1936) is a case in point).44 Such performances exchange the vigor, interest, and lyricism of detail within a broadly proportioned, readily understandable formal frame for placidness, aridity, and a sad predictability that is entirely at odds with Hindemith's conception of music. Hindemith's severer critics were profoundly wrong in claiming that the Craft theory turned his work into academic exercise. Instead the constraints of the compositional habits developed from his theoretical basis freed and renewed his creative impulses and enriched his music just as Hungarian folk music did for Bartk and Kodaly, or as the atonal syntax and later the twelve-tone method did for

Schoenberg and those associated with him. The insight, imagination, and self-criticism Hindemith brought to his own music was increased by the compositional guidelines of the Craft theory, especially in its mature stages. Anyone who knows the series of masterworks produced between 1934 and 1939among them Mathis, Der Schwanendreher, Trauermusik, the three piano sonatas, Nobilissima Visione, and the six chansonswill grasp this point readily. If these comments seem to clash with published reports of Hindemith's performance style, I do not believe that they are inconsistent with his recorded performances from the 1950s or with the ideals of his music.45 A few cautionary remarks should be added, however, about his early music. In pieces written before Op. 43, the performer or conductor must have a keen sense of the different stylistic idioms of the rst quarter of the century, for this music is as stylistically eclectic as it can be technically inconsistent. The Viola Sonata, Op. 11, no. 4, is Hindemith's homage to Debussy, and it would plainly be the gravest error to give it a too architectural or Regerian quality or to put too brittle an edge on its occasional Pierrotesque whimsies. On the other hand, the Sonata for Viola Solo, Op. 11, no. 5, is a unique synthesis of Debussy and Reger (or Reger-Bach), and the character of the performance must be adjusted accordingly. The piece must not be given the frankly New Objective tone of its companion. Op. 25, no. 1. Likewise, the Cello Concerto, Op. 3, and the cello pieces of Op. 8 should clearly reveal their antecedents in Strauss. But the Cello Sonata, Op. 11, no. 3, has to be as sharp as possible, at once as architectural, rhythmically intense, and psychologically detached as the New Objective transmutation of brutalism that it is. The same may be said of most of the Suite "1922," Op. 26, though it is tempered by parody. The wind quintet Kleine Kammermusik, Op. 24, no. 2, is a delightful combination of Mozart and the gentlest side of the New Objective mannerthe best preview in the early music of an important facet of Hindemith's later style. These examples should indicate the requirements of Hindemith's early music: a knowledge of the period and the ability to render subtle stylistic differentiations. The later music demands a considerably broader historical knowledge, and a combination of formal repose and lively detail. NOTES 1. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Conversations (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 122. I am indebted to Douglass Green for bringing this comment to my attention. See also his article "Cantus Firmus Techniques in the Concertos and Operas of Alban Berg" in Rudolf Klein, ed.,Alban Berg Symposium Wien 1980: Tagungsbericht (Alban Berg Studien, vol. 2 [Vienna: Universal, 1981]), 56-68. 2. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 103.

3. Alfred Einstein, "Paul Hindemith," Modern Music 3 (1927): 21. 4. Darius Milhaud, Notes without Music, trans. Donal Evans, ed. Rollo Myers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 95. 5. Hindemith as the neue Typus is the protagonist of Heinrich Strobel's biography, Paul Hindemith (Mainz: Schott, 1930; 3d ed., 1948). An especially perceptive reading of the relationship between neoclassicism and expressionism in Hindemith's early music may be found in Giselher Schubert, Hindemith, Rowohlts Bildmonographien, no. 299 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohit, 1981), 48-50. 6. A reasonable case could be made for Brahms as one of the most important inuences on Hindemith, but it is also important to stress the wide range of Hindemith's sources: he was "a mid-twentieth-century representative of the German cosmopolitan line of Schumann, Brahms, and Reger; additional inuences in his work came from Debussy as well as from Bach, Handel, Schiz, and the German sixteenth-century Lied composers" (Donald J. Grout, A History of Western Music, rev. ed. [New York: W. W. Norton, 1973], 687). Though it does violence to the metaphor, I should also make it clear that I do not claim that Hindemith was the only inheritor of Brahms's mantle. 7. Two previous studies which have taken up this question with problematic results are Victor Landau, "Paul Hindemith: A Case Study in Theory and Practice," Music Review 21 (I960): 38-54; and Eberhart Zwink, Paul Hindemiths "Unterweisung im Tonsatz" als der Konsequem der Entwicklung seiner Kompositionstechnik (Gppingen: Alfred Kummerle, 1974). See also the comments in Andres Briner, Paul Hindemith (Mainz: Schott, and Zurich: Atlantis, 1971), 305-07; the review of Zwink by Peter Cahn, "Hindemith aus der Sicht statistischer Analyse," Hindemith-Jahrbuch/AnnalesHindemith 4 (Mamz: Schott, 1974): 140-48 (hereafter cited as HJB); and further comments on Zwink by Bernhard Billeter, "Die kompositorische Entwicklung Hindemiths am Beispiel seiner Klavierwerke," HJB 6 (1977): 104-21. 8. Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, Vol. 1: Theoretical Part, trans. Arthur Mendel (New York: Associated Music, 1942; rev. ed., 1945). Title of German original, Unterweisung im Tonsatz, Band 1: Theoretischer Teil (Mainz: Schott, 1937; rev. ed., 1940). Vol. 2: Exercises in Two-Part Writing (New York: Associated Music, 1941). Title of German original, Unterweisung in Tonsatz, Band 2: bungsbuch fr den zweistimmigen Satz (Mainz: Schott, 1939). Unless indicated otherwise, citations from vols. 1 and 2 are from the translations. Vol. 3: bungsbuch fr den dreistimmigen Satz, ed. Andres Briner, P. Daniel Meier, and Alfred Rubeli (Mainz: Schott, 1970); trans. in part by unnamed Yale University students in the mid-1940s (unpublished photolithographic copy in the Yale Hindemith Collection). Vol. 4: bungsbuch fr den vierstimmigen Satz (unpublished; only one chapter, "bung 21," extant; photolithographic copy in the Yale Hindemith Collection). Citations from vols. 3 and 4 are from the German texts. The four volumes are cited hereafter as Craft I, II, III, and IV.

9. Ian Kemp, Paul Hindemith (London: Oxford University Press, 1970); Stanley Sadie, ed.. The New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), s. v. "Hindemith, Paul"; Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man behind the Music (New York: Crescendo, 1975). The translation of Briner's biography was announced in 1984 but has not appeared as of this writing (March 1985). 10. Paul Hindemith: Zeugnis in Bildern, 2ded. (Mainz: Schott, 1961); Paul Hindemith: Die letzten Jahren (Mainz: Schott, 1965); Giselher Schubert, Hindemith. 11. Twelve volumes of the Jahrbuch were published between 1971 and 1983. 12. Dieter Rexroth, ed., Hindemith-Zyklus Nordrhein-Westfalen 1980-81 (Wuppertal: Kulturamt der Stadt, 1980). 13. Schubert, Hindemith, 108. 14. Hindemith mentions this remark of J. C. Bach in his Johann Sebastian Bach: Heritage and Obligation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 12. 15. Hindemith, Bach, is a revised version of the lecture. The autobiographical character of this document has been noted by most writers on Hindemith's later career. 16. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1933; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 98. 17. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), 232. 18. On Hindemith and the several movements of the early 1920s, see the essay collection Erprobungen und Erfahrungen: Zu Paul Hindemith's Schaffen in den Zwanziger Jahren, ed. Dieter Rexroth, Frankfurter Studien, no. 2 (Mainz: Schott, 1978). Also, Rudolf Stephan, "ber Paul Hindemith," HJB 4 (1974): 45-62; Dieter Rexroth, "Tradition und Reexion beim frhen Hindemith," HJB 2 (1972): 91-113; "Zu den Kammermusiken von Paul Hindemith," HJB 6 (1977); 47-64. 19. The most accessible of Halm's criticism is collected in Von Form und Sinn der Musik, ed. Siegfried Schmaizriedt (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1978). Schenker's antimodern criticism may be found scattered throughout his writings, but particularly in the later works, including Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, 3 vols. (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1925-1930); and Der freie Satz, Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, vol. 3 (Vienna; Universal, 1935), trans. as Free Composition by Ernst Oster (New York: Longman, 1979). 20. Schenker's mystical formulation of this appears in the introductory material to Free Composition. The biological analogy apparently never attracted Hindemith, who favored the physical and architectural images he derived from Hans Kayser. 21. Schenker, Meisterwerk I,219. 22. Ludwig Finscher, "Paul Hindemith: Versuch einer Neuorientierung," HJB 1 (1971): 18; Guy, Freud, 233. 23. Craft I, 153-56; Introductory Remarks for the New Version of "Das Marienleben," trans. Arthur Mendel (New York: Associated Music, 1948), 13; A Composer's World: Horizons

and Limitations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1969), 139-44; "Hren und Verstehen ungewohnter Musik," lecture at University of Zurich, December 15, 1955, published in HJB 3(1973): 178-79. 24. Briner, Hindemith, 273-74. Rudolf Stephan discusses the inuence of Schoenberg on Hindemith's music in the twenties in "ber Paul Hindemith," HJB 4 (1974): 45-62. See also Andres Briner, "Paul Hindemith und Arnold Schoenberg," HJB 4 (1974): 149-51; Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, "Paul Hindemiths Aufbruch und Heimkehr," HJB 4 (1974): 18, 26-7; and my Ph.D. diss., "Counterpoint and Pitch Structure in the Early Music of Hindemith" (Yale University, 1976), 218-21. The comment about the Webern pieces is in Hindemith, "Hren und Verstehen," 185. 25. Theodor W. Adorno, "Ad vocem Hindemith, eine Documentation," in Impromptus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 51-87. See also Rudolf Stephan, "Adorno und Hindemith: Zum Verstndnis einer schwierigen Beziehung," HJB 7(1978): 25-31; Briner, "Hindemith und Adornos Kritik des Musikanten: Oder, von sozialer und soziologischer Haltung," HJB 1 (1971): 26-41. 26. Dieter Rexroth, "Tradition und Reexion," 91-113. 27. Dieter Rexroth, ed., Paul Hindemith: Briefe (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 122-23. The translation is mine. Hindemith's letter, which is dated Frankfurt, October 25,1926, was written in response to the comment in Schenker's Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, volume 1, cited above. The version of Hindemith's letter published by Rexroth is actually a draft; John Rothgeb shared a copy of the nal letter, in which only a few small changes were made. Schenker replied on November 12. To Hindemith's point about Schenker's idea and the musician's understanding, Schenker said: "Your 'good musician' always waits till someone else's opinion is published and then wants to make everyone believe that he knew the same thing (really beforehand). Why didn't he discover his own opinion earlier?" To Hindemith's assertion that Schenker's theories also have validity for contemporary music: "You had the kindness to express [the thought] that my ideas on past music hold true for present-day music as well. I myself do not nd this [to be the case]. I think that you would do better to have the courage to declare that contemporary music is wholly new than to attempt to anchor it still in the past." The nal line of Schenker's letter makes the gulf between the two men plain indeed: "It is certainly true that your music is no longer connected with that of the masters. You do not admit it, so I must unequivocally state it." 28. Heinrich Strobel, Paul Hindemith; Hans Mersmann, Die moderne Musik seit der Romantik (Wildpark-Potsdam: Athenaion, 1928); Die Tonsprache der neuen Musik (Mainz: Schott, 1930). Strobel also wrote the forewords to Zeugnis in Bildem and Paul Hindemith: Werkverzeichnis (Mainz: Schott, 1969). 29. Arnold Whittall, Music since the First World War (London: J. M. Dent, 1977), 74, 75.

30. Bach, 39. In the English translation, Hindemith uses the phrase "melancholy of capacity." See also Schubert, Hindemith, 112. 31. Franz Willms, "Paul Hindemith: Ein Versuch," in Von Neuer Musik, ed. H. Grues, E. Kruttge, and E. Thalheimer (Cologne: F.J. Marcan, 1925), 115-16. 32. Ernst Kurth, Die Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts: Bachs melodische Polyphonic (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1917); Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners "Tristan" (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1920). See also Rudolf Stephan, "Zur Musik der Zwanzigerjahre," in Dieter Rexroth, ed., Erprobungen und Erfahrungen, 1112. 33. Willms, "Hindemith: Ein Versuch," 83-84. 34. Rexroth, Hindemith: Briefe, 124. My translation. 35. P.134. 36. The sharp polarization of opinion and the mixture of arts criticism and politics is very characteristic of the period. Hindemith, for example, concentrated in the major operas on the question of the artist's social responsibility. See Dieter Rexroth, "Das Knstlerproblem bei Hindemith," HJB 3 (1973): 63-79; and "Zum Stellenwert der Oper Cardillac im Schaffen Hindemiths," in Erprobungen und Erfahrungen, 56-59; also James D'Angelo, "Tonality and its Symbolic Associations in Paul Hindemith's Opera Die Harmonie der Welt" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1983). 37. The last phrase of the German version of this poem is "neu zu bewahren." 38. Hindemith even uses ecological imagery in "Hren und Verstehen," 176; and in "Sterbende Gewsser," in Reden und Gedenkworte (Orden pour le Mrite fr Wissenschaften und Knste) 6 (1963-64): 47-75. 39. Willi Apel, ed., French Secular Music of the Late Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1950). 40. A Composer's World, 154. 41. Foreword to Apel, French Secular Music. 42. I am indebted to Luther Noss for this information. 43. Interview with Keith Wilson, New Haven, Conn., October, 1979. 44. Paul Hindemith: Three Piano Sonatas, Glenn Gould, Columbia M 32350 (copyright 1973). 45. Dietrich Bauer, "Paul Hindemith als Bratschist," HJB 6 (1977): 146-47; Skelton, Hindemith, 98. I refer to his performances in the EMI series "Paul Hindemith Conducts His Own Works" (Angel nos. 35489-35491).